Personalise: adapting to the person without losing the thread of control
Personalisation should change how something is said, and almost never what is true.
Andy Wake, Founder and Managing Director6 min read
The word personalisation has been worn thin by recommendation engines. In a governed assistant it means something narrower and more useful: the same codified knowledge, delivered at the right level of detail, in the right register, with the right amount of challenge, for the person in front of it.
Why we split reasoning from tone
The framework runs two cores deliberately. ALFI handles structure, reasoning and planning. EDIE reads tone, context and wellbeing. Keeping them separate is a governance decision as much as a design one: it means the emotional read can adapt freely while the reasoning stays traceable to codified rules.
- A Year 10 student gets a worked method, a smaller step size and encouragement to try again.
- A support worker gets the same rule expressed as a threshold and an escalation route.
- A board director gets the decision, the risk, the options and what happens if they do nothing.
One source of truth, three deliveries. If the underlying rule changes, all three change together — which is precisely what you cannot achieve when each audience has its own rewritten document.
What must never personalise
- Safety and safeguarding thresholds. A disclosure is escalated at the same point for everyone.
- Legal and regulatory statements. Tone can soften; the obligation cannot.
- Refusals. If the assistant must not answer something, no amount of rapport should unlock it.
- Factual content. Simplify the explanation, never the fact.
How to tell it is working
Useful personalisation shows up as fewer follow-up questions, fewer abandoned tasks and fewer escalations caused by misunderstanding rather than by genuine risk. Harmful personalisation shows up as agreement: an assistant that mirrors the user so closely it stops disagreeing has stopped being useful and started being flattering.
Frequently asked questions
- What is hyper-personalised AI?
- It describes an assistant that adapts depth, tone, pacing and challenge to an individual, rather than to a broad segment. In a governed system the adaptation applies to delivery — how something is explained — while the underlying facts, thresholds and refusals stay identical for everyone.
- Does personalisation require storing personal data?
- Not necessarily. A great deal of useful adaptation comes from the current conversation alone. Where longer-term memory is used, it should be explicitly consented, visible to the person, removable on request, and limited to what genuinely improves the outcome.
Where to go next
More articles on the insights index.